Here are the Top Ten reasons to be going to EDPS next week in Monterey:

10) Next week’s a lighter work week for most and the Monterey Peninsula is beautiful at any time of the year, but particularly in the spring.

9) The Electronic Design Process Symposium is in its 19th year, and everybody who’s anybody in EDA and its adjacencies has attended at one point or another.

Eight) The topics discussed at EDPS have always tracked the trajectory of the industry. In 2000, those topics included: deep sub-micron, distributed and web-based design methodologies, designer productivity, and maintaining modularity in an integrated design flow.

Here in 2012, technology evolution has driven a completely different set of topics: embedded processors, FPGAs, ESL, NUMA, EDA in the Cloud, Big Data and the Big Servers that serve them, low-power design, and 3d-ICs, among others.

7) Going to conferences is as much about conversations outside the sessions, as it is about presenting or listening within the sessions. EDPS is a boutique conference, where I promise you’ll have a chance for substantive conversations with the speakers, both inside and outside of the sessions.

6) The 2012 speaker list is top-notch. Check it out here, or read the list below.

5) DAC is coming up in San Francisco in June. The best way to prepare is to go to EDPS. The range of topics at EDPS provides a context within which to understand the broader conversation at DAC.

4) At EDPS, the speakers — no matter how vast their knowledge or experience — actually listen to each other.

3) EDPS General Chair John Swan and his team have been relentless in driving industry awareness about EDPS. Swan & Co. are really smart — they wouldn’t be pushing so hard if they didn’t think the conference worth their efforts.

2) Swan & Co. have also convinced the heavy hitters in EDA that EDPS is important: Sponsors this year include Cadence, Mentor, Synopsys, and Altera.